Going from Peep Show to Burning Men: A Conversation with Multi-talented Filmmaker Jeremy Wooding for the Release
When young musicians Ray (Ed Hayter) and Don (Aki Omoshaybi) are evicted from their South London squat, they decide to sell their precious vinyl collection and fly to Memphis in search of their destiny. Frustrated by the shortfall in funds, they steal an ‘uber-rare’ Black Metal record at a Camden record fair and head out of town to sell it. As they drive north in their beaten-up Volvo Amazon, picking up hitchhiker Susie (Elinor Crawley) en route, they find themselves stalked by dark forces apparently unleashed by the ‘devil disc’ they have stolen.
Jeremy Wooding was born in 1969 in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England. He is a director and producer, known for Bollywood Queen (2002), Blood Moon (2014) and Burning Men (2019).
In our interview, Jeremy tells The Fan Carpet’s Marc Jason Ali about working on TV and Film, his wishlist to work with and his ambitions...
So if we start at the beginning, was there a defining moment for you to get into the film industry?
Oh yes when I was 11 or 12 years old (laughs) messing around with Super 8 equipment and family films editing them together having a little editing machine and a camera and getting hooked on what it was to make a film and put bits together, splice them together. So at that point I thought “oh maybe this is what you do as a film-maker or a film director” and so yeah after that it was about “how do this and where do you to to learn how to do this”?
Brilliant. Sounds like a good place to start. What was the initial idea for Burning Men, because you obviously wrote it as well?
Yeah the original idea goes back ten years when I was walking across Hampstead Heath with my co-writer Neil Spencer and I said “I’d really like to make a road movie” being a big road movie fan and I got an idea of the two characters that I wanted in the car and the kind of mission that they might be on, but basically these two characters are wannabe musicians and they make a living by trying to sell vinyl records at record fairs.
So initially it was about two record dealers and wannabe musicians and the idea goes back to in the mid 90s when I used to have a stall at Camden Electric Ballroom which sold vinyl and CD’s and I got to talking to a lot of record dealers and realised that everyone was kind of after the big disc that would make them a lot of money, you know, the white label of Jimmy Hendrix that no body new existed that sort of thing.
So it was currency that you could say that young guys would want an original acid tape disc or something valuable that would get them to where they wanted to go to America.
You’re known primarily for your TV work like with Dani’s House and Dick and Dom and stuff like that, how’s the transition been for you going into more film directing now?
Well I worked in TV for about ten years and towards the end I kind of got stuck in children’s TV, I did three children’s TV series, but before that what I first got into telly my first job was directing Derren Brown, so the very first Derren Brown shows which was quite a radical way of presenting magic on TV and it was about 1999/2000 and then through that production company I was asked to direct a couple of pilots for this new show called Peep Show. So I directed two pilots every year for Peep Show and got totally interested in the way that you could present a story in this POV style, Peep Show was not my idea to do a POV style, it came from the writers they wanted to do a comedy through the eyes of these two central characters and certainly the original idea came from a documentary called Being Caprice which was a day in the life seen through her eyes, so they’d seen this and it was kind of like “oh this could be fun” and if we could hear their internal thoughts it could be quite funny and counterpoint what they think and what they’re doing.
So it was my job to actually make this work practically and to write the film grammar so that this would work and nobody had done this before so we did two pilots to get that into shape, so right from then I was thinking “this could work as a feature film” and there was talk at the time of doing a Peep Show feature film but people kind of thought it was just a TV sitcom and didn’t really have the legs.
Two comedy juggernauts though (laughs).
Now they are, at the time it was such an odd series and Channel 4 seemed like they where about to can it every week.
That’s unfortunate, but I’m glad it had a long life.
Yeah and Derren Brown as well, both the Mitchell and Webb and Peep Show and Derren Brown have gone onto greater things and not we’re not forgetting Olivia Colman was in Peep Show...
True and look at the success she’s had.
Some of my favourite scenes are those with Olivia and David which where the sort of on/off romance scenes.
Burning Men is released in select cinemas now, and out on Digital release from 18th March, available at the following: Amazon | BT Store | Sky Store | iTunes | Google Play | Microsoft | Rakuten
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